1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a computer program product and computerized method and system for the systematic and scientific analysis and evaluation for the programmed prioritization and scheduling of tasks or resources to an individual or group to accomplish competing tasks.
2. Background Art
Many individuals and most knowledge workers in today's society and economy must balance the priorities of tasks that compete for limited time and resources against deadlines. These many individuals and most knowledge workers have access to a variety of personal productivity devices, from personal digital assistants (PDAs) (typically integrated with cellular telephones), sophisticated cell phones, personal computers, and networked personal computers.
These individuals, especially the knowledge workers among them, interact with networked demands and tools and time dependent, prioritizable activities, for example, with financial institutions and transactions (on line banking, billing, bill paying, accounts payable scheduling and ordering, and stock transactions), health care providers (appointment scheduling, prescription management, e-mails to and from providers), and personal issues (birthdays, anniversaries. These same individuals frequently work with or otherwise interact with a variety of traditional applications (for example—general ledger, expense accounting, purchasing, problem management, or personnel systems), workflow, or calendar based applications that automate some of the operations of the enterprise or institutions.
The point of view of most designers of the traditional, workflow, or calendar based applications used by these enterprises and institutions has heretofore been limited. The designers typically see the application as single focused for the provider's application and the user's specific interaction or set of interactions with the provider. Therefore queues and prioritization schemes that implement the enterprise goals within the application are performed in isolation from other enterprise applications as well as from the user's other needs, tasks, and priorities. Consequently, the user, typically a cross-application knowledge worker, is constantly juggling competing priorities.
Most enterprises have responded to this state of affairs by using a de facto single point of contact to drive employees toward priorities associated with enterprise goals. That single point of contact is generally an e-mail interface, frequently an interface to collaboration tools, scheduling tools, and e-mail. However, the e-mail interface was never designed for use as a prioritization and dynamic scheduling tool.
Consequently, the user is presented with a proxy for enterprise goals through poor lenses when the uncorrelated priorities set by the individual user's wants and needs are divorced from enterprise goals and even more distant from the user's capabilities to respond on time.
This goes beyond mere workflow management and calendar management applications, which receive only limited input from heterogeneous applications in their native application context, and do not support inputs from users or users' colleagues.
Thus, there is need for the systematic and scientific analysis and evaluation of end user task scheduling through the programmed prioritization and scheduling of tasks or resources of an individual or group to accomplish competing tasks, preferable on time.
There is a further need for the programmed prioritization and scheduling of tasks or resources to assess the range of tasks, priorities, assess capacities, and provide responses, especially responses consistent with enterprise objectives.